


149 Hours on Nameless Border Moon #357

by deepcreek



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F, Hook-Up, Pre-Canon, Rarepair Gre'thor, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-07 21:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11632563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepcreek/pseuds/deepcreek
Summary: Seska and B'Elanna crash land. It makes some things easier.





	149 Hours on Nameless Border Moon #357

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magnetgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnetgirl/gifts).



B'Elanna is elbow-deep in shuttle guts when Seska announces "Torres. There's another one," at which point she curses and stops trying to bypass the thermal regulator on the impulse engine. Usually Cardassian patrol ships travel solo this close to the border, but the raids their base has been launching must have made somebody more cautious.

"Shitshitshitshitshit," she mutters, trying to stuff wires back into their compartment as though this action is useful (it beats doing nothing! her brain shouts).

"Anything M-class within our range?"

"There's a moon, but it's swampy," her pilot replies, paging rapidly through their crap-tastic printed atlas (the computer would otherwise slow down when calculating ballistics, and besides the sensors blink out too often to be trusted with topography). "We won't be able to get out of there again by ourselves."

They're taking fire, and the computer announces with irritating calm that shields are down forty percent on the aft side.

Sometimes in moments like these, when she doesn't want to die, B'Elanna's brain goes really really fast. If she could control this maybe she wouldn't have dropped out of Starfleet Academy.

"Do we have any of the missile shells left?"

"Yeah, but I threw out most of the explosives when you said we had to jettison weight." Seska is somewhat snappish, which is understandable.

B'Elanna rips the wiring she was trying to fit together out of the access panel. Something sparks and catches on fire. _Perfect._

She thrusts out a hand. "I need some of your hair."

Seska stares at her, so she clicks her fingers. Whatever in that panel is broken clicks too. They can fix it later.

There's no time to stare at Seska's fish expression, so B'Elanna tugs the ballistics shell from the launch tube and starts stuffing the wiring inside it. She whips out her knife from its belt loop and takes a chunk of her bob off on the left side, and she throws that in the missile shell too.

She looks up to see Seska's hand and a handful of hair in it, and she grabs that, wondering who is steering and realizing it really doesn't matter. "Take us low over the moon and get ready to do a steep emergency dive."

 

***

Getting a cannibalized shuttle to deploy a missile at a precise time while going really fast, and then making the shuttle disappear as the missile blows up, is hard. B'Elanna and Seska, luckily, are hard as hell.

Still, B'Elanna is glad to be lying on the floor of the shuttle now, staring at the drift of smoke coming out of that damn access panel. "You sure you put the blaze out, Ses?"

Seska is winding gauze around a slash the navigational controls put in her arm when they made their landing, and her voice is a little strained. "It's fine, d'worry about it. Why don't you grab the crash pack before the Cardies start scanning this swamp?"

 The crash pack has the berry flavored nutrition bars, which everyone knows are the best ones. It also is missing its second thermal blanket-- probably someone took it to pad out their bedding back on base. After a light supper chased with purified swamp ‘water’ (the atlas clearly hadn't tasted the stuff), this becomes the source of an argument.

 “Seska, you’re being ridiculous. You’ve got to take the blanket, you’re injured.”

“Torres, you don’t have an inch of fat on you. I’ll be fine.”

In the end the blanket stays in the pack, and they sleep curled into themselves on opposite sides of the cabin, not because they are angry, but because they are proud.

In the morning, Seska has deep circles under her eyes, and B’Elanna is a bit paler than usual.

***

 The days are not particularly long on the moon, so they’ve set the shuttle computer to 26-hour cycles of low light and darkness. It makes B’Elanna feel like she’s at a sleepover, or a vigil.

“What was your adolescence like, what did you do for fun?” she asks Seska almost at random. They’re sprawled against each other on the floor after a grueling workout.

Seska laughs, but it isn’t a nice laugh. “The Occupation didn’t allow for much fun. I remember hanging out in town squares and gossiping, but it’s hard not to cover that over with trying to survive, you know?”

B’Elanna nods; she does know. Then they talk about her own teenage days and the assholes she used to run with, and then about assholes in general, and who on the base they’d like to see stranded somewhere remote and difficult to access.

“You have a nice laugh, Seska.” She’s somewhat surprised – she was expecting something a little too flowery from the feminine, image conscious Bajoran. Instead, Seska is proving to be the kind of hearty, sturdy woman her father would have labeled a role model.

Seska tucks a strand of hair behind her ear as she mutters thanks, and shifts away from her a little.

“Should we be sending a distress signal out? It’s been almost three days.”

“I’d say we could use one of the missile shells as a message beacon, but I used them already. If I set up a cycling phase variance on the message we’d be less likely to be detected, but we can’t burn too much energy…”

When B’Elanna is thinking hard, her forehead wrinkles more. She finds this embarrassing and is grateful she didn’t chop off her bangs during their escape. She grabs a pencil and begins scribbling calculations in the margins of the atlas.

That ‘night’ Seska brings the blanket over to where B’Elanna is shivering on her side of the shuttle. She lies down beside her and draws it over them. She isn’t as warm as B’Elanna would have thought, but her weight is somehow comforting.

***

B’Elanna is staring at the ridges in Seska’s nose. She wonders what it’s like to have ridges on your nose instead of your forehead. Both are made of cartilage, as she knows from the Earth Punk-obsessed Bajoran she’d met in San Francisco who had pierced his ridges.

Seska’s eyes flutter open as her bedmate reaches out to touch the bridge of her nose, and her hand shoots up to trap B’Elanna’s wrist. Her grip is very tight at first, but loosens when she recognizes whose hand she is holding.

“Torres, what are you doing?”

She blushes. “I wondered if your nose felt the same as my forehead ridges.”

Seska tilts her head, considering, then nods as if this is a perfectly normal wake-up request. “Let’s find out.” She leans towards the other woman, her hands relaxing to her sides.

B’Elanna feels as though she’s been blessed. She’s never heard of a case where someone touched Seska before she touched them—and got away with it, that is. Her hand is shaking a little as she reaches out once more, this time sweeping her thumb up the outside of Seska’s right nostril. (She wants to get a read on what regular Bajoran skin is like so she has something to compare the ridges to.) Her skin is so soft—B’Elanna hasn’t had access to good lotion in months and is a little envious that her copilot isn’t chapped like herself.

She can feel Seska’s breath move past her fingers, and she sweeps up rather than think about how intimate the situation has become. It doesn’t help that the woman’s eyelids flutter like her last lover’s when she runs the pad of her thumb over the first ridge at the bridge of her nose.

As she presses a thumb into the ridge, Seska inhales sharply, her hands clenching into fists. “Sorry,” B’Elanna says self consciously. Her voice is a little rough, and she clears her throat before explaining herself. “Your ridges are much more inflexible than mine. I guess the nerves are distributed differently too.”

Seska laughs. “You’re so scientific. It’s not that it hurts, it’s just that no one’s ever done that before.” She opens her eyes with a smile that is almost physically striking to the engineer leaning over her. There is an awkward moment where B’Elanna is unsure what to do, and Seska certainly isn’t going to tell her.

Finally she relents. “Turnabout is fair play, Torres.”

“Oh! Okay. Just don’t scratch them, yeah?”

Seska’s fingers are gentle as they brush aside B’Elanna’s bangs. The skin on her hands is rough and callused with manual work, and a hangnail catches on the vee of B’Elanna’s topmost forehead ridge. She can’t bear to close her eyes, not when someone she trusts is admiring the part of her she hates most. Instead she watches the skin around Seska’s mouth and eyes—the way it dimples and wrinkles and shifts as Seska traces three fingers down the left side of her forehead. Yes, her crewmate really is admiring her.

Seska is watching her back, of course, as she comments, “Your ridges really are much more sensitive than mine. I think the cartilaginous layer must be thinner.”

B’Elanna laughs and kisses her on the mouth.

After a further period of mutual exploration, Seska pulls back and examines her closely. “I didn’t realize investigating new phenomena provoked such a strong reaction for you, Torres.”

B’Elanna blows hair off her nose. “You know damn well you’re pretty. If you’re going to touch me like that, I’m going to kiss you.”

Seska smiles. “I wasn’t being scientific enough, you mean?”

That night B’Elanna falls asleep with Seska’s head on her shoulder.

***

The days pass much faster when she can run her hands through Seska’s hair as they argue over the Bajoran wormhole, when she wakes up with a hand on her hip. “I’ve still got you to myself,” Seska says on the morning of the sixth “day”—“They haven’t found us yet.”

That afternoon, of course, the comms system pings. The initial scouts hadn’t seen past B’Elanna’s missile trick, but Chakotay had spotted it as soon as he’d heard of it at base (of course—they’d used a similar trick eight months back when flying a mission into Cardassian territory).

“How long have you been going after him?” asks B’Elanna as they wait, shoulder to shoulder, for the _Valjean_ to get within range. Seska doesn’t look at her as she says, “I still am.”

“Oh. So that means this was..?”

“Look at me.” Seska’s eyes are very green. “This was wonderful, B’Elanna. You are wonderful. I’m just not sure if, when we’re back on base…”

B’Elanna has had girls say this sort of thing to her before, girls who didn’t see women holding hands when they were young, who worried about _what people might think_. She sighs, absentmindedly brushing her bangs across her forehead. “We’ll talk about it later, okay?”

Seska squeezes her shoulder (damn, she’s strong!). “Okay.”

***

Later, after she brushes up a little close to Seska in the control room of the _Valjean_ , she's cornered in the hall by an apologetic Bajoran who "just isn't... look, it's not that you... I just don't feel that way about you I guess." When she finds out the truth B'Elanna wonders if her crewmate's cold heart is a Cardassian cultural feature or something the Obsidian Order trained into her -- or just the way that Seska's always been. She wishes she'd met Seska when they were both sixteen, when she was angrier and more reckless and her counterpart more open, when both of them had less to hide. Blinking back tears, she turns away from the stupid death and the adventurous joy which Seska offers her, half-regretting that she's no longer the sort of woman who makes the other choice.

In the moment, she clasps Seska's hand in her own.

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for PixieDane, who once sat behind me at WisCon and talked about Leia in a way that made me want to re-watch Star Wars.
> 
> One thing I love about Voyager so far is the way that it draws out small elements of its characters (B'Elanna's delight at new technology, Kes' openness, Tuvok's determination to know why) and shows how this aspect simultaneously makes them who they are and fundamentally endangers them. I think that every time Seska and B'Elanna locked lips it was like that.
> 
> Thanks to tumblr user danny4xb for the last-minute beta/pep talk!


End file.
